About Tembo
At Tembo, we’re on a mission to make home happen — helping people buy their first home, remortgage, move up the ladder, and save smarter towards homeownership.
Our app and web experiences sit at the heart of life-changing financial decisions. Customers trust us with their savings, mortgages, and futures. That means quality, reliability, and predictability aren’t optional — they’re fundamental.
We’re proud to be:
⭐ 4.8-rated on Trustpilot (~5k reviews)
💸 Well funded by Gresham House, Goodwater Capital, Aviva, McPike Family Global Office, Ascension, Love Ventures, and ethical backers including Fair by Design, Barrow Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Big Society Capital
The Role
We’re looking for a hands-on Head of Frontend (Mobile & Web) to own our customer-facing engineering surfaces end-to-end.
This is a functional leadership role. You will be accountable for how frontend engineering operates at Tembo — from architecture and standards to delivery predictability and production reliability.
You’ll lead a small team of frontend engineers working within cross-functional squads, while retaining ownership of frontend craft, quality gates, release discipline, and technical standards across the organisation.
You will remain deeply hands-on — contributing code, reviewing PRs, shaping architecture — but you will also be responsible for ensuring frontend delivery is calm, predictable, and high-quality.
When something breaks in production, you own the response and the systemic fix.
When delivery drifts, you correct it.
When standards need raising, you define and implement them.
Your mandate is simple: make frontend a highly reliable, high-trust function that the business depends on with confidence.
You will report to the CTO and work in close partnership with the CPO and Head of Engineering.
What You’ll Own
Delivery & Predictability
- Own frontend release readiness and mobile app store submissions
- Define and uphold clear quality gates before production release
- Improve delivery predictability through better planning, estimation, and technical scoping
- Ensure frontend commitments are realistic and consistently met
- Partner with Product to make conscious, well-informed trade-offs
Production Reliability
- Be accountable for frontend stability, crash rates, and performance
- Improve observability, monitoring, and debugging practices
- Lead incident response for frontend issues and drive systemic fixes
- Build processes that prevent recurring production regressions
Technical Direction
- Own architecture across React Native (mobile) and React / Next.js (web)
- Make pragmatic decisions around technical debt and long-term maintainability
- Introduce and evolve testing standards (unit, integration, E2E)
- Raise the bar for code quality, performance, and engineering discipline
Functional Leadership
- Lead, mentor, and develop frontend engineers
- Set clear expectations and performance standards
- Improve ways of working across squads while maintaining frontend coherence
- Hire and grow the frontend function over time
Product Partnership
- Work closely with the CPO and Lead Product Designer during discovery and planning
- Translate product ambition into well-scoped technical plans
- Surface technical risks early and clearly
- Contribute commercially-minded judgement in a regulated fintech environment
About You
- 7+ years of frontend engineering experience, with deep expertise in React and React Native
- You’ve owned production mobile apps and web platforms in real-world environments
- You’ve led a team and been accountable for delivery outcomes — not just features
- You’ve inherited existing systems and improved their reliability and predictability
- You think in systems, not just components
- You care deeply about quality — but you understand commercial trade-offs
- You’re calm under pressure and comfortable carrying responsibility
- You remain highly hands-on and enjoy building
You don’t just improve code.
You improve how engineering operates.
Bonus Points
- Experience in fintech or other regulated industries
- Experience improving release processes or stabilising a scaling codebase
- Experience building or contributing to design systems
- Experience implementing observability and crash analytics in mobile environments
- Familiarity with feature flags and experiment-driven development
Why Join Tembo?
- Work on products that directly change people’s lives
- Operate at a stage where professionalism, trust, and impact truly matter
- High-trust, remote-first culture with real ownership
- Recently relaunched benefits package including:
- Enhanced parental benefits
- Health insurance
- Your birthday off
- An abroad company away day (Portugal 🌴)
We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds.